The present invention relates to a continuous film take-up apparatus for taking up a plurality of tapes of film in succession into a film magazine.
For carrying out a procedure of printing pictures onto a photographic film in a photographic printer with efficiency, the feeding of the film to the printer is conducted with the use of a film magazine in which a plurality of film tapes spliced with one another using adhesive tapes are wound on a reel.
For taking up the films in the film magazine, a conventional method includes splicing the tapes of film by hand and manually winding the tapes onto the reel of the film magazine.
However, such a troublesome combination of the splicing of two films by hand and the taking up of the films in the film magazine requires considerable amounts of time and labor and the efficiency of feeding of the films will hardly be increased.
We, the inventors of the present invention, have developed and proposed a continuous film take-up apparatus for feeding a plurality of films in succession to a photographic printer. The continuous film take-up apparatus allows the plural films to be continuously wound on a reel while overlapped one after the other without splicing as compared with the conventional manner. In particular, the leading end of each film is placed not over but under the trailing end of a preceding film so that the films can be released in succession from the film magazine due to the friction between the leading and trailing ends.
The continuous film take-up apparatus however fails to have a scheme for overlapping the films with the leading end placed under the trailing end automatically. To do so, a labor process is still needed. It is thus desired to have such a scheme.
In view of the foregoing conventional method of taking up films in the film magazine, an object of the present invention is to provide an improved continuous film take-up apparatus in which a plurality of films are fed and wound in a succession onto a reel of the film magazine without the need of splicing the films, thus ensuring an efficient film take-up action.